I'd like to go out on the ocean and catch some fish. Rockfish, cod, lings, That'd all be nice. After this storm passes.

I'm free on saturdays, sundays, mondays, for fishing.

We'd be splitting rent and if we can get three people on the skiff it'd be 25$ each.

Let me know if you're interested.

Well, I bit.

Got in contact with radlations and before we know it we're splashing in to a cold early december morning in Santa Cruz. RENTAL SKIFF FISHING!!! We didnt have a lot of bait on us so we decide to try and find some bait in the form of either squid or baitfish. I motor up to a bunch of seagulls working the surface and we drop in. I put in a jig for market squid with a large jig for humboldt as the weight.

I begin to drop down and NOT EVEN 40ft my rig STOPS. I reel down to HEAVY resistance and it's HANAPAA!!! Super heavy and slow but strong pulls, humboldt squid for sure. Man-cranked the monster up and there it was, flashing red with its gnarly tentacles stuck on the big jig's spikes. We use the net and get it on board. These squid thankfully are a lot smaller than the humboldt squid that we got into a few years ago, 8-10lbs or so instead of 40lbs. Rad is hooked up too and it is WIDE OPEN FISHING. It gets to the point that I try light tackle fishing for them, 6ft bass spinning rod and 20lb braid meant for Light Tackle/Shallow Water rockfishing. I pull in 2 boldts on my light set up and within an hour of fishing, Rad and I are looking at possibly 80lbs of squid at the bottom of the boat. 7 or so humboldts between the two of us.

Me- "You done?"

radlations- "Yeah, you done?"

Me- "Yeah, I dont know what to do with so much squid!"

So after that encounter with the squid we try to motor up to natural bridges and find rockfish. I get to a place that I expect to be 70ft or so deep but my shrimp-fly rig stops just 15ft below the boat! WHAT THE?? I reel down to heavy pulls of a humboldt! HEY! GET OUTTA HERE!!! I look down and I see 4 big humboldt squid attacking my shrimp-fly! The hook buries itself in one of their tentacles and Im hooked up on squid again. About the next third of our time we spent trying to avoid the humboldt squid, THEY WERE EVERYWHERE. We tried other reefs, we tried deep, we tried shallow, we couldnt avoid them!

We didnt find our first rockfish until we went back to the lighthouse. Using shrimp flies with pieces of frozen anchovy produced blacks and yellows when we found the school. Once we got to half limits I switched to my light tackle Swimbait with a 2oz jighead on my little spinning rod, and the rockfish ATE IT UP!!! Blacks just 12inches long were swallowing the whole lure! It was a blast! We got mostly blacks with a few yellows, couple gophers, brownie, red and I got one BIG copper.

After I filled my limit, I turned my attention to trying for a lingcod. Big swimbaits and live bait produced no monsters and the afternoon wind blew us off the water by 2pm.

NAVIGATOR

RADLATIONS (yes he's real)

I ended with a limit of RF, and took home 4 humboldts. Rad took 3/4 limits and 4 humboldts.

VERY fun day on the water! Boat rockfishing is pretty much over but if youre ever in the SC area and want to hookup, drop me a line!_________________

Nice!!!! I think the squid have seriously screwed up the fishing down there atm. A lot less rockfish this year and them were smaller then years past. Usually we get a few halibut through the year, none this year. Lings were on par for average though in SC for us._________________I fish, the salt and the sweet.
I hunt the grasslands to the mountains.

Thanks for the read O. What a kick-... day.
So, how was that night's eating? Dang, now I'm turning a little green just sitting here debating which cold left overs to micro._________________always kick the scales off the rocks

The humboldt squid was EXCELLENT. I removed the membranes from the meat then cut the tube into small dice-sized cubes and put them in a stir fry with costco stir fry veggies and shrimp. When my college buddies came over that night I put the big copper rockfish and a humboldt steak on the hibachi grill. Went PERFECT with a cold kona longboard lager!_________________